Eight years before the world learned the name COVID-19, a veteran science journalist warned that reckless viral tinkering could unleash doomsday and stain the reputation of the National Institutes of Health a warning that Anthony Fauci privately mocked before ordering an aide to please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file, according to newly released documents.
The records, obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation, deepen concerns that Fauci destroyed federal records despite testifying under oath that he had never done so. Deleting official government communications violates federal law, and the emerging paper trail is now colliding with Faucis carefully crafted public image as the sober, science-first bureaucrat who guided Washingtons pandemic response.
Fauci did not respond to a request for comment. His silence comes as congressional Republicans, long skeptical of his judgment and candor, continue to probe his role in funding and defending risky research that many conservatives view as a textbook case of unaccountable government science run amok.
The controversy dates back to 2011, when so?called gain?of?function experiments research that deliberately makes viruses more contagious or more lethal in the lab first exploded into public view. With funding from Faucis institute at the NIH, Dutch virologist Ron Fouchier engineered an airborne strain of bird flu with an estimated 50% fatality rate, which he described as probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.
Fauci and New York Times science writer Phil Boffey soon clashed in the opinion pages over whether such experiments were defensible. The dispute pitted a powerful federal health official who saw opportunity in manipulating pathogens against a journalist alarmed that taxpayer dollars were underwriting what looked like a manmade pandemic threat.
In a December 2011 Washington Post editorial, Fauci argued that manmade pandemic viruses are a risk worth taking because they could help pharmaceutical companies and public health agencies get ahead of a naturally emerging threat. NIH Director Francis Collins and National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Vaccine Research Center scientist Gary Nabel co?authored the op?ed, signaling institutional backing at the highest levels of the federal health bureaucracy.
The New York Times responded in January 2012 with an un?bylined op?ed, now revealed to have been written by Boffey, accusing NIH of having created an engineered doomsday that could kill hundreds of millions of people. The consequences, should the virus escape, are too devastating to risk, he wrote, in an apparent rejoinder to Faucis risk worth taking formulation.
Boffey followed up in March 2012 with a second piece, The Truth About the Doomsday Virus? as public scrutiny forced Fouchier to walk back earlier boasts about his viruss lethality. Even as Fouchier softened his rhetoric, Fauci pressed to publish the full details of the experiment, brushing aside biosecurity experts who warned that the information could be a gift to would?be bioterrorists.
As the question mark in the headline suggested, Boffey remained unconvinced by Fouchiers new assurances. He noted that experts who had reviewed Fouchiers initial description of the work said it clearly stated that the airborne strain remained as lethal as the original virus in nature.
One line in that March 2012 column appears to have particularly unnerved Fauci: Now, this countrys National Institutes of Health, which financed the research and has its own reputation on the line, is asking the [NSABB] to reconsider its call to redact details before publication. The sentence cut to the heart of the matter that NIH, not just a lone Dutch scientist, was pushing to loosen safeguards around a potential doomsday pathogen.
Phil Boffey is really off base here, Fauci complained in a March 4, 2012, email to Collins. He is acting like a mischievous guy.
Clearly, people are getting to Phil Boffey and he is swallowing it, Fauci fumed in a more candid message to a subordinate the next morning. The tone reflected a familiar pattern for critics of Fauci: public insistence on dispassionate science, paired with private efforts to marginalize dissenting voices.
Fauci was at that point vigorously opposing a recommendation from NIHs own biosecurity advisers to withhold sensitive details of Fouchiers work from publication. He warned that if the advisers did not reverse themselves, the field of research on influenza has a serious problem, framing the issue as a threat to scientific progress rather than a legitimate concern about catastrophic risk.
It was in this context that Fauci issued the now?notorious instruction: Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file, he wrote from his NIH account, in what appears to be a direct violation of federal record?keeping requirements. For conservatives already wary of the administrative state, the order reads less like routine housekeeping and more like an attempt to erase a damaging record of internal dissent.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul has already flagged two other instances from 2020 in which Fauci appears to have sought deletion of public records, despite his sworn 2024 testimony before another committee that he had never done so. The pattern, if confirmed, would undercut not only Faucis credibility but also broader claims that federal health agencies can police themselves without robust outside oversight.
Fauci ultimately succeeded in persuading NIHs biosecurity panel to allow the Fouchier experiment to be published in full. Boffey and Fouchier did not respond to requests for comment, leaving unanswered how they now view the debate in light of the COVID?19 era.
When COVID?19 emerged, Fouchier again surfaced in Faucis orbit, this time as part of a small circle of virologists working to downplay the possibility that the virus had escaped from a lab. Fouchier ghostwrote a key argument in The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2, a paper that dismissed a lab origin and that Fauci would repeatedly cite over the years without disclosing his behind?the?scenes collaboration with its authors.
Privately, however, the papers authors acknowledged that Fouchier was unbelievably conflicted. Ron is not going to want it to be a GOF [gain-of-function] escape, one author admitted, underscoring the professional and reputational stakes for a scientist whose career was built on pushing the boundaries of viral manipulation.
True to form, Fouchier opposed openly grappling with the lab?leak hypothesis in the Proximal Origin paper. He warned that doing so could cause harm to science by reigniting debates over biosafety.
This manuscript would be much stronger if it focused on the likelihood of the first two scenarios as compared to intentional or accidental release, Fouchier argued. That would also limit the chance of new biosafety discussions that would unnecessarily obstruct future attempts of virus culturing for research and diagnostic purposes for any (emerging/zoonotic) virus.
For many on the right, those words encapsulate the deeper problem: a taxpayer?funded research establishment more worried about harm to science and regulatory obstruction than about transparency, accountability and the catastrophic downside risk of its own experiments. As more emails surface and more contradictions emerge, the question is no longer just whether Fauci deleted records, but whether a powerful scientific bureaucracy has been allowed to operate with too little scrutiny for far too long.
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